Aspen Art Museum

Our new website for the Aspen Art Museum, a museum of contemporary art, coincides with the opening of its new building by Shigeru Ban featuring a woven wooden facade, and the development in house at the museum of a new visual identity featuring custom fonts by the typographer Radim Peško.

The site is organized as a database of “everything”, a growing archival grid of all artists and events that have passed through the museum.

On other pages, such as the “About” and “Visit” pages, the site uses our highly flexible content management system, Economy, allowing the museum’s designers to reconfigure these pages and to invent new pages as new needs arise.

The site is designed to look as great on phones as it does on desktop, a goal which is reinforced by the design’s emphasis on “the now” and on the natural environment. Our thought experiment was that a user should be able to physically see the new building from the nearby ski lift, check what exhibitions are on view on a phone, and walk straight in from the bottom of the lift.

A sophisticated and visually immersive calendar system. The yellow margin at right is a subtle indicator that the event is within a week, a system that applies to all information throughout the site.

The website uses a different font weight each season, so that it appears robust in the spring and summer, emaciated in the winter. This attitude towards nature is echoed by the “windy” logo at the top of the page (a way to show all four fonts at once), and by generous and irregular (but systematic) use of whitespace in the layouts, in balance with the grids of the “everything” database pages. Yellow is always used to highlight today’s events, which lends the site’s palette a natural, paper-like feel. A verbal message at the top of the homepage (for example, “the museum will open at 10am”) further emphasizes the present and presence.

The museum’s shop is tightly integrated with the rest of the site, and can be integrated with an in-store point of sale system. Users can purchase a catalog directly from an exhibition page, and from then on the shopping cart at the top of each page of the site until the user checks out. Users can purchase museum memberships online, and can receive membership discounts thereafter, even in the same cart with the original membership purchase.